Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: business advice

  • Avoiding business dependency issues

    Avoiding business dependency issues

    Fortune magazine this week describes how Facebook’s change to the Timeline layout has killed business pages and the billion dollar industry in maintaining those pages.

    According to Mashable, views of Facebook business pages have halved since the timeline feature was introduced which in turn has destroyed the markets of businesses like Buddy Media and Vitrue who were making a good living from setting up corporate Facebook pages.

    Once again this shows the danger of being locked into one service or platform to do business – you genuinely have all your eggs in one basket.

    Whether it’s relying on only one customer or one supplier, the business who is locked into a single channel risks ruin whenever the owners of that channel decide to change something.

    In Facebook’s case, it isn’t greed or simply bastardry that has killed these businesses, just an unintended consequence of an improvement to their service.

    For many businesses throwing all there resources onto social media platforms, they should remember that Facebooks – or Twitter, LinkedIn, Google’s or Pinterest’s – business objectives are not necessarily theirs and any business partnership is at best unequal.

    If you’re going to depend upon one customer or supplier, at least make sure you’re making a fat profit to cover the risk that losing them will kill your existing business.

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  • The Death of the IT Guy

    The Death of the IT Guy

    Until recently the cottage industry of computer repairers was thriving, having been born with the massive take up of computers by homes and businesses in the 1990s.

    Over the years, things got better for the local IT guy as businesses and then homes became networked. Some of the smarter technicians started selling and supporting servers and things got better.

    The arrival of the Internet, the approach of Y2K bug and, in Australia, the introduction of the GST made even more business for the local computer tech and the Windows virus epidemic of the early 2000s guaranteed plenty of work for anybody who knew how to wield a screw driver and a boot disk.

    As the industry matured, maintaining office servers and looking after the regular glitches in desktop computers was a steady, reliable source of income for most support companies.

    Every few years businesses or homes would upgrade their computers and that would trigger a cascade of costs as data was migrated and older peripherals like printers, serial mice and ADB accessories had to be replaced.

    Then all came to a stop with the arrival of cloud computing services where many of older computers could access online applications just as well as newer computers.

    For IT organisations with a business plan based up customers upgrading systems every three to five years this was a disaster.

    These businesses were already feeling the pinch with the late arrival and market rejection of Microsoft Vista and now their customers could sit on older XP machines and happily use the latest online applications.

    Sensible IT folk have understood the change and the good support companies now have an armoury of cloud based services for their customers. These businesses know the IT hardware and support spend of most businesses is shrinking and taking the market with it.

    Unfortunately there are a few holdouts trying to keep the old business model alive who have a hundred reasons why cloud services are no good for their customers.

    To be far to those fixed on the old IT model, this attitude is probably even more prevalent in corporate IT departments and among CIOs with cloud services seen – probably rightly – as a threat to their power and income.

    One of the biggest risks to those support folk who aren’t at least evaluating cloud services for their clients is that shrinking IT spend and eventually there won’t be much money, or customers, left for the old model.

    A similar thing is happening to bookkeepers and accountants as newer businesses and those with younger owners or managers are moving to cloud based software while the older ones are wedded to their legacy systems.

    The older accountants who won’t move to the newer systems are finding their businesses growth stagnant while their younger colleagues are picking up the work from new businesses.

    Computer support was always a business based upon the transition to a digital workplaces, similar to the men employed to walk in front of early motor cars with red flags.

    Now workplace technology has matured, there’s less work for the IT guy. Hopefully most of them will make the change and not get run over like the guys clutching red flags.

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  • On being a Luddite

    On being a Luddite

    “I’m a Luddite”, magazine editor James Tuckerman proclaimed as Master of Ceremonies for Microsoft’s Asia Pacific Bizspark Summit this week.

    James was referring to an article in Australian Anthill in the 1990s where he predicted businesses would never use the Internet for research.

    Being a Luddite isn’t a bad thing, James contends. In his view being skeptical about technology enables business owners to better evaluate technology as Luddites “think like a layman, don’t know the limits and think commercially”.

    None of this is true though – being a skeptic is not the same as being a Luddite.

    The original Luddites in the English Midlands weren’t anti-technology, they were opposed to the technology that would put them out of work.

    At the beginning of the 19th Century, mill workers were a highly skilled and extremely well paid trade but the new automated loom technology meant those skills were no longer needed.

    To protect their livelihoods, the loom workers started smashing the new machines and burning down factories. Eventually they were viciously suppressed by the British government with some being executed while others were transported to Australia.

    What drove the Luddites was the loss of their income and who is to say we would have behaved any differently if we were faced with being unemployed and destitute in the harsh conditions of 19th Century England.

    However we shouldn’t equate being skeptical about technology with being protecting one’s turf.

    Today’s Luddites are those businesses who don’t want to move with the times – those who have grown fat on easy credit or lazily clipping the tickets on state sanctioned monopolies.

    Some of those Luddites are going broke as consumers stop buying electrical goods or cars, while others lobby their friends in government to protect their privileged and profitable positions.

    In the early 1800s the Luddites eventually lost, we can only hope that when history repeats itself two hundred years later today’s Luddites haven’t damaged the economy too much.

    James Tuckerman isn’t a Luddite and that’s why he’s part of the future. I just wish he wouldn’t call himself one.

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  • Using your customers to build a world beating business

    Using your customers to build a world beating business

    Listening to your customers is a business truism, it’s so obvious that it really shouldn’t have to be said. Unfortunately all of us have to be reminded of this sometimes.

    The amazing thing is today’s business has the tools not just to listen to our customers, but also to react quickly.

    At Microsoft’s Asia Pacific Entrepreneur summit this week, we had the opportunity to hear from some of leading voices of the Australian startup and investment community.

    One of the things that really leapt out from the array of founders, investors and entrepreneurs is how successful businesses thrive from listening to their customers.

    Michelle Deaker spoke of her experience in founding giftcards.com in 1997. At that time there was no experience in running an online gift card business and the only way to figure out what worked was to listen to customers. Eventually Michelle sold out of the business and today talks from the investment side of building enterprises as the CEO of OneVentures.

    Viocorp founder Ian Gardiner described how their video streaming business not only has to adapt to customers’ needs but also to a market that has dramatically changed over the last decade.

    Moving quickly to respond to those market changes is something Sebastien Eskersley-Maslin of Blue Chilli touched upon in his presentation where startups in their Venture Technology program are encouraged to get a built product out of the door in three months.

    “You can’t build quickly enough” says Sebastien.

    Sebastian also has a three customer view – there’s the customer that you build the product for, the bulk customer such as a corporation and the “strategic customer” who is the potential buyer for your business.

    Considering the business buyer as being the ultimate customer fits into the Silicon Valley model of “flipping” business which isn’t applicable for many ventures although it illustrates that we need to consider customers through the prism of our own business objectives.

    That we often don’t listen to customers is unforgivable in an always on, connected world. We have the communications tools like social media and the business intelligence tools to monitor visits to our websites and sales through our stores.

    In a world where we’re lionizing technology startups on the basis of the number of users – note “users” are not the same as “customers” – or the amount of money a large corporate will pay for a small development team, it’s important we don’t lose touch with the basis of all businesses.

    Ultimately it’s the customers who matter – if we don’t solve a problem, fill a need or provide value then our businesses are ultimately worthless.

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  • Little disruptions

    Little disruptions

    Seasoned travellers learned long ago to treat the phone in their hotel room with caution as massive mark ups on call charges were a nice profit centre for most establishments.

    With the arrival of the mobile phone, that revenue stream started to shrink and now one hotel in Vancouver has decided to replace their room phones with iPhones.

    The Vancouver Opus hotel already supplies iPads in their rooms and the phones seem a natural extension to that, particularly given the chain has a “virtual concierge” app to guide guests.

    Increasingly it’s only the older hotel chains that rely on excessive charges for things like telephone calls and Internet access. Those establishments rely on the more senior business traveller who are locked into a 1970s way of travelling.

    When you stay at cheaper accommodation or newer boutique establishments, you find many of the expensive extras in the major chains are available cheaply or free. It’s a quandary of travel that a backpackers’ hostel will offer free Wi-Fi while the Sheraton up the road will charge $60 for an often inferior service.

    The opportunity for the Sheratons, or the Hiltons, or the Four Seasons to charge those sort of rates is dying at the same rate their older clientele is retiring. Its a dead model.

    Fortunately for those hotel chains, slamming guests with fat phone charges was just icing on a very rich cake, the loss of those revenues over the last two decades has been unfortunate but not fatal.

    Other businesses though might not be so lucky – if your business relies on big, unreasonable markups then right now you are in a sector very ripe for disruption.

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